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'Five winters': the twilight of communism in Russia

2022-01-21T09:32:15.330Z


At that time, also an aspiring writer, the correspondent Olga Merino worked during the 1990s in Moscow, where she witnessed the process of degradation of the country. 'Babelia' advances some chapters of the book, which Alfaguara has just published


I started filling out notebooks around the age of eighteen.

Notebooks of everything and nothing where, with meticulous and neat calligraphy, I copied poems, paragraphs from novels that had dazzled me and song lyrics, pasted newspaper clippings, made some horrible

collage

or drawing and above all I told myself my ravings romantics and the fever of an atrocious vocation that whipped me with a seven-tailed whip: I was terrified of writing.

Basically, the first years are the inventory of a void.

I have a special fondness for Russian notebooks—seven in all.

I never intended to publish them.

It never even crossed my mind that someone would snoop on them, unless I was already dead.

He understood them as a receptacle, a redoubt of solitude, a soliloquy, writing in the pure present, where chance was outlining new arguments.

Aware that he was experiencing an exceptional moment, personally and historically, he did not want to lose a single crumb or for the memory to distort the experience of Moscow.

I was then just twenty-eight years old —when they made me the offer to move to Moscow, twenty-seven—, an age in which, as Vila-Matas wrote, “I was so available to life that any nonsense could infiltrate it and change it. ”.

---

On the street, one's tear ducts freeze, the aqueous humor that keeps the eyes moist. You feel like a deep breath could hurt your lungs more than a Celtas without a filter. Or, worse yet, a papyrus, one of those Soviet cigarettes with a cardboard tube for a stem, long enough to finish the tobacco to the end without burning your fingers or gloves. The best known brand is called Belomorkanal. It was introduced in the 1930s to celebrate the completion of the canal linking the White Sea, in the Arctic, with the Baltic Sea, through Lakes Onega and Ladoga, a 220-kilometer project built by thousands of Gulag prisoners. of skeletons shaken by hunger and cold. One puff knocks you out. pure trilite,like the one they must have used to burst the frozen ground.

The squawks of the rooks. Or should we say crows? Here people use the balcony as an annex to the refrigerator, but you cannot leave food without a stone, a lid or something heavy on it, since it is taken away. The crow is a thief, like the magpie. In Russian it is called vorona. It is the bird of Russia.

Before returning to Spain, Berna takes me to the TsUM state store to buy sheets, towels and other household items, both stuffed in clothes like sausages, stepping on dirty snow. Curious, the sheets: the top consists of two pieces of cloth, sewn together at the edges, with a huge hole in the center of the upper piece, in the middle of the rectangle, like a patch, to put the blanket inside. I already have a Russian teacher: Maria. Two hours a day of class, from Monday to Friday, another "shock therapy", like the one that is shaking the country to overturn it in a flash, from the planned economy to disheveled capitalism. Berna is helping me with the casting of translators, and we both agree that the best is Yuri Kriuchkov; He is tall, very attractive, with beautiful blue eyes and above all intelligent.If we finally reach an agreement, Yuri would leave the Interfax agency to work with me. The sheets that we buy, by the way, cannot be hung on the balcony wires now, but inside, on a collapsible clothesline; otherwise they would freeze.

Bad bagpipes and headache. It must be the weight of low atmospheric pressure or, worse yet, the air we breathe, loaded with magnetic particles, waste from factories or thermal power plants, which spit very dense white smoke into the sky, like puffs from a dragon giant. At the very least, they keep us warm indoors. The sum of factors usually produces granite headaches, accompanied by an unbearable drowsiness, especially after two in the afternoon, when the light begins to fade. You would fall asleep in the chair. It gets dark early; the few streetlights give off a very dim, ghostly light.

A man has installed a camping table on the sidewalk of Vernadski Avenue where he offers chicken legs to passers-by. Since the prey comes frozen in big cushion-sized blocks, the guy, with his arms outstretched above his head, throws the lump of ice against the snowy ground, over and over again, like in the Middle Paleolithic, until they break off. a quarter or two of chicken with its brim of frost. They call these thighs Bush's legs, because they started arriving from the United States about a year ago, at the height of shortages, as subsidized food exports. The Russians are very good at putting nicknames with breeching.

Every morning we cross half of Moscow in Yuri's car from the University quarter to the office, at number 15 Petrovka, a stone's throw from the Bolshoi Theater and Red Square, a very central street, with a stately air and so nineteenth-century that it would seem plausible that Chekhov's ghost emerged from a portal, rushing like the White Rabbit to arrive on time for a rehearsal with Stanislavski. I have rented a room —

El Periódico

He sends me the money to pay the rent—, with a large window, carpet and a divan upholstered in bottle green, at the headquarters of Prensa Latina, Cuba's news agency, honored for being the island's organ pampered by the regime Soviet, with a stunning place in the heart of the city, a magnificent house, in the absence of a coat of paint, with very high ceilings with coffered ceilings, the home of some rich merchant before the revolution. But now, a little over a year after the USSR flag was lowered from the Kremlin, no other language is used here than that of the hard, cold dollar, no old fraternal ties with tropical socialism, so the Cubans they are forced to sublet the rooms to third parties so that they can pay the bills —I suppose so; I prefer not to ask.Attached to my room is the one occupied by the Colombian F., dedicated to buying and selling I don't know what, and then the noble room opens, the most spacious, to receive visitors, with its sofas, a map of the USSR and two huge black and white portraits of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, with a cigar and very young, as if he had just come down from Sierra Maestra. At the end of the corridor are the rooms occupied by Notimex, the Mexican news agency, in which a Chilean also works, and the one that the Cuban boys have been assigned, the most modest, with the telex and teletypes of TASS and Interfax , three machine guns that do not stop spitting paper. Shared toilet and kitchen. Good Latin atmosphere with the mix of nationalities. All colleagues manage with Russian, although sometimes they resort to Yuri. It's not just about the devilish language,but of

kremlinology

, the cuneiform hieroglyph of interpreting every little gesture, every political statement, every silence of the

nomenklatura

.

The forms have not changed.

As there are few bars and restaurants —they are starting to open now, with exorbitant prices, very expensive for me and unaffordable for Russians—, we come home with a good breakfast and the rest of the day we goofing off with tea, cookies, peanuts and some

butterbrod

. Yesterday, however, we went out with Yuri to have lunch at a

stolóvaya

, a very affordable Soviet canteen where civil servants and masons go about restoring facades and buildings. There are no seats in the premises; you eat standing up, on a table more or less at chest height. Single dish, now:

pelmeni

, a pasta stuffed with minced meat similar to ravioli but without any sauce.

At the exit of the Kitai-gorod subway, scores of retirees, fifty, seventy, maybe more, lined up side by side, offering hurrying passers-by anything imaginable: itchy wool socks, bottles of vodka, cans of sardines in oil, a couple of new candles, light bulbs, teapots, plates, linen towels, a gold ring, homemade compote, a tin tray with hand-painted flowers... The trousseau is being sold to eat

I invite Yuri and a friend of his to dinner at the Uzbekistan restaurant. The friend works in an office linked to the Government that prepares economic reports and statistics; He is going to pass us some information to pull the thread and make a report. We

ordered plov

rice

and

gul-kabob

, highly spiced lamb meat rolls. We are served by a completely drunk waiter. He leaves the kitchen and stumbles through the dining room. He spills two glasses on the table when serving us.

We drink too and toast,

na vashe zdorovie

(to your health!).

They tell me that, at parties, when the guests are about to leave, the final chinchín is said

na pasashok

, literally “for the cane”;

that is, a drink for the way back.

But since the last drink always takes time to arrive, the last one for real, there is a string of subsequent toasts to, half jokingly, half seriously, lengthen the trance of the alcoholic farewell:

stremenaya

(for the stirrup),

sedélnaya

(for the saddle),

zabugórnaya

(behind the hill), and so on up to twelve or thirteen.

The most common way to greet each other here:

-Hello, How are you?

Normalno

(normal).

People respond with that very useful adjective that sums up what everyone wants: to live a normal life.

It's not little.

Another greeting from the same jaez:

-How is life going on?

"We breathe!"

Suffering has molded them into a race of Stoics.

Another wildcard word here: “

Nichevó

” (literally, “nothing”).

When you miss the shuttle bus that takes you to the subway,

nichevó

;

when the bread runs out in the store,

nichevó

;

when life gives another goring,

nichevó

.

Holiday in Russia, the International Women's Day. Yuri gives me three red carnations and a box of chocolates. We went for a drive to the Lenin Hills, the highest point in Moscow. Magnificent views over the city and the Moskva River. Newlywed couples arrive, still wearing tulles and veils, to take photos and drink champagne.

three carnations.

Russians love triplets, the number three: you have to be three to drink and play cards.

There were three secret police agents who broke into homes at dawn for an arrest in the hard years of Stalinism.

Three horses pull the troika, either a sled or a wheeled carriage;

three, the ideal number of mounts to advance on the snow: the horse of sticks (the one in the center) goes at a trot and the lateral ones, the reinforcement ones, at a gallop, so that they lead the one in the middle;

thus the beasts tire less and maintain speed.

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Source: elparis

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